SAN JOSE, Calif. — Coding is intimidating. It seems preposterously hard. So technical. You need degrees and training and a certain kind of brain.
But Jessica Dennis, a programmer working in upstate New York, says that’s not true.
To become a programmer, you just need to know how to Google.
Over the last year or so, you could be forgiven for thinking Apple has been dickering about. The company seemed sluggish and slow.
Yeah, there have been a few hardware upgrades, but nothing special, and certainly nothing breakthrough.
And then today! Bam! A jam-packed WWDC keynote with a slew of amazing-looking new hardware and software.
Apple is back, in a big way!
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Students take heed: The winter semester is off and running, and it’s going to be time to turn in term papers before you know it. If you’re stressing out about getting through your reams of writing in a timely fashion, we’ve got a suggestion you might not have considered — writing with PDFs.
PDFs not only produce a great looking final document, they also offer a versatile and flexible format for the writing and research process itself. With the right tool, you can build PDF documents that include time-saving annotations, perfect for highlighting the important parts of your research and adding notes along the way. You can organize your work in super useful ways and create a table of contents for easy navigation.
Wearing headphones tends to cut you off from the world, but Wearhaus’ Arc headphones are more sociable.
The wireless Arc headphones allow multiple headsets to stream audio from the same source. Think silent disco, watching a movie together, or sharing tunes with your BFF.
As TVs get flatter, their sound gets worse. Enter Sonos’ latest home theater speaker, the $699 Playbase, a thin and flat home theater/streaming music system designed to sit underneath your TV.
Like the TV above it, the Playbase is thin, but it packs a significant punch. Resembling a pizza box with rounded corners, it features 10 speakers, including a muscular built-in subwoofer, and it can make quite a noise. In fact, it sounds fantastic.
The Playbase is louder and punchier than Sonos’ current home-theater speaker, the Playbar, and a lot more unobtrusive. You don’t really notice it’s there, until it starts shaking the room.
Although Google’s Android dominates the worldwide smartphone market, the CIA concentrated on Apple’s iOS because of its popularity among global elites, WikiLeaks reports.
The huge trove of leaked CIA documents, codenamed “Vault 7” and released Tuesday by WikiLeaks, reveals that the CIA formed a special unit called the Mobile Development Branch (MDB) to infect smartphones. And within that unit, Apple’s iOS was a prime target.
Apple’s stock saw a big surge after the company announced record-breaking earnings for Q1 2017.
AAPL was up almost 3 percent in after-hours trading to $124.50. Apple stock has been climbing recently but was depressed in anticipation of today’s results.
Moshi’s Mythro Air wireless earbuds look good and sound good. They offer all-day battery life, a clever magnetic clip to keep them in place, and a unique feature that allows you to share music from a single source to two sets of Mythro Air earbuds.
Best of all, they cost $69.99, and sound better than premium earbuds costing two or three times more.
The world of quotes is a poorer place without Steve Jobs, who was a quote machine. Nonetheless, plenty of people talked about Apple this year, whether lauding the company’s successes or damning its strategies.
Here are the most memorable Apple quotes of 2016.
To promote his new design book, Jony Ive has made a video giving a very rare peek inside Apple’s ultra-secretive design studio.
The video is only the second one that I know of that shows the inside of the “studio behind the Iron Curtain” — so called because it’s so sealed off from the outside world. (The other was last year’s 60 Minutes episode).
While watching it, I recognized a lot of details that I mention in my book about Jony Ive but I don’t think are generally well-known. So I screenshot the video and made a few notes. Warning: This one’s for the design nerds.
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Wireless speakers tend to be cheap and nasty — or fantastic and expensive.
There are exceptions, though, and Moshi’s Spatia wireless AirPlay speaker is one of them.
At $399, the Spatia isn’t cheap by any means, but its sound and features rival systems costing much more.
And does it sound sweet. With five drivers, including a subwoofer, the Spatia serves up a rich, wide soundstage. Lots of speakers claim “room-filling sound,” but the Spatia truly fills the bill.
In the last decade or so, lots of companies have gotten design religion. Design has been brought in-house, where it can shape products from the very get-go. There’s an obvious source for this idea — Apple.
This week on the Kahney’s Korner podcast, I talked to Oliver Seil, senior design director of Belkin International’s Innovation Design Group. We discussed Belkin’s products and design process; the surprising complexity of USB cables (and why they cost so much); and why Apple has had such an enormous influence on design and manufacturing.
You can listen to the podcast or read a full transcript of the interview below. (Or dive into the show notes.)
The tech industry appears to be nice and clean, but it has a long and toxic history of environmental damage. Silicon Valley is home to the most Superfund cleanup sites in the country.
A new film, Death by Design, takes a sobering look at the electronics industry and its toxic environmental legacy — both in the United States and in China. The film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the cost of the devices we consume in some measure of ignorance.
Apple features heavily in the film, though it’s not the only tech company implicated.
This week on Kahney’s Korner, I talk to the documentary’s director, Sue Wiliams, about Apple, pollution and Silicon Valley.
For many ugly years, manufacturers considered industrial design an afterthought. They would outsource the task to a contractor or neglect it altogether, in an effort to get products out quickly and cheaply.
The result: hideous-looking products that didn’t work well or proved difficult to use.
Nowadays, companies like Apple are changing the game when it comes to incorporating industrial design and user experience into product engineering.
On this episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk with Oliver Seil, senior design director with Belkin International’s Innovation and Design Group. Seil is Belkin’s Jony Ive, the top designer who overseas the company’s diverse array of products.
Belkin specializes in mobile accessories, from power packs and iPhone cases to WeMo home automation products
Increasingly, some Apple fans think Jony Ive has lost it.
He’s killing ports and headphone jacks left and right. The latest MacBooks value form over function. He’s designing gold watches for the 1 percent.
And now his glossy new photo book, Designed by Apple in California, looks like a $300, linen-bound ego trip.
Looking like something Elvis Presley would rock, the Shure MV51 is a handsome, retro-styled microphone well-suited to podcasting with an iPad or iPhone. Sturdy and portable, I find it great for recording on the go. It’s small enough to throw into a jacket pocket and, because it’s made of all metal, it’s nigh indestructible.
Paired with an iPhone and Shure’s well-designed recording app, it’s a lot more compact than most podcasting rigs, and versatile enough for most recording situations. Best of all, the audio it captures sounds great.
In the early ’90s, Pixar was in the middle of creating its first movie, Toy Story, but the company was in disarray. It was bleeding cash and floundering around looking for a business model.
To help turn it around, Steve Jobs hired Lawrence Levy, a former corporate lawyer, to help figure out how to make Pixar a real business.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk to Levy about how exactly he and Jobs made Pixar into one of the most successful movie studios in history.
After his death, Steve Jobs became mythic. He’s remembered as an asshole and a technology seer: a Tony Stark-like figure who could uniquely divine the sci-fi future, conjuring magical products from whole cloth almost single-handedly.
He’s also seen as infallible: a business and technology genius with powers of divination beyond those of us mere mortals.
But To Pixar and Beyond, a new book by Lawrence Levy, the former CFO of Pixar, paints a very different picture.
While Apple is touting the new MacBook Pros as a major evolution of the laptop, the internet is in open revolt over the cost of the new machines.
The new MacBook Pros will set you back at least $200 more than last year’s models, and sometimes much more.
The top-of-the-line 15-inch MacBook Pro, for example, costs an eye-popping $4,299 — without tax, and with no preinstalled software.
Prices are even worse in Europe and Asia, where potential buyers are wondering if it would be cheaper to fly to the U.S. to buy a new machine than get one at home.
David Bunnell, the founder of Macworld and all round good guy, died Tuesday night at age 69 at his home in Berkeley, Calif.
There’s a constant war in our house for charging bricks and cables. I like to keep chargers in certain places so I know where they are — beside the bed for example. But they constantly disappear, thanks to my light-fingered kids.
It drives me bananas, which is why I like the Udoq, a universal charging stand that neatly organizes and charges between two and eight devices. It can’t be easily half-inched.
It’s true: music can put you in the mood for love. A Spotify survey found that music is more arousing than touch. That’s why OhMiBod’s iPhone-connected sex toys make sense; they enhance the mood as well as buzzing in time to the beat.
“Our massagers offer an unrivaled sensory experience that allows singles and couples to not only hear their favorite music, but feel it as well,” says the firm’s website.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk to Suki Dunham, cofounder of OhMiBod, a female-owned and operated company that makes a line of iPhone and iPad controlled female pleasure products.
Suki used to work at Apple, where she learned a lot about product design, packaging and marketing, which she applies to her business selling high-tech vibrators.
iFixit’s iPhone 7 teardown involved 30 people in three countries, an X-ray machine and lots of sleepless nights. Thanks to iFixit’s hard work, iPhone teardowns have become a tech-culture phenomenon. Millions of fans eagerly await details of the internal components of Apple’s latest devices.
A lot of this has to do with Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, the second-biggest supplier of Apple parts after Apple itself, and publisher of the huge and amazing iFixit repair wiki.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk with Wiens about all the work that goes into making the iFixit teardowns for a massive global audience, and the hardware secrets of the iPhone 7.
With the new iPhone 7 Plus sold out worldwide, some owners are turning a pretty profit on Craigslist and eBay.
There’s a brisk trade in brand new iPhone 7 devices, especially the Plus models in jet black, with many selling for almost twice their retail value.
This premium jet black 256GB iPhone 7 Plus, for example, just sold for $1,775 on eBay, with 29 bids. That’s $806 above retail.
Thirty minutes into Apple’s special event last week, one tidbit of information blew my mind.
Onstage, Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams was talking about the Workout app on the new “swim-proof” Apple Watch Series 2 and the effort the company put into advancing the software that makes the fitness device tick. The amount of research deployed, all in the pursuit of updating a segment of an app many Apple Watch wearers will never use, offers a peek into the enormous resources that Apple R&D commands.
It paints Apple, with its enduring emphasis on developing new materials, manufacturing processes and sophisticated software, as a scientific force to be reckoned with — a new NASA for the 21st century.
